Ugly Character, Ugly Film
Jonah Hex may be an excellent example of how to make a flop of a movie. It was simply that bad. I’m only passingly familiar with the character but I do know that he is not supposed to be able to raise the dead even though they got most of the rest right. I thought that bit just simply didn’t make that much sense and was a vain attempt to throw in a supernatural element to the film. Why? I don’t know and apparently neither did the filmmakers.
The storyline is barely comprehensible, basically all I got was that Hex killed this guy’s son during the American Civil War and the father came back and disfigured Hex and then proceeded to kill his wife and child and then went on to mastermind this plot to blow up Washington and thus ensuring that the South could conquer the North after all. Hex was saved via Native American’s mystical mumbo jumbo but he didn’t come entirely back and instead gained the power to resurrect (partially) dead people for brief periods of time and decided to become a bounty hunter. Don’t blame me if the summary sounds disjointed, because basically the whole movie is like that. It’s like they were trying to tell a Western, shifted to a gritty revenge flick, threw in some supernatural elements from The Sixth Sense, and just for the heck of it, decided to try and imitate Will Smith’s Wild Wild West flick with steampunk and retro-technology. It’s like they can’t decide what genre they’re using for this film.
Action movies tend to be weak on plot, but they usually manage to balance it out with flashy and glitzy action sequences that wow the audience. Jonah Hex however is an exception and was disappointing in that regard. The special effects were some of the dumbest and lamest that I have ever seen. Hex's disfigured face was well alright, but not as gross and gory as it should have been. It was like a halfhearted attempt to visually scar the man but still ensure that he wasn't THAT bad looking. The sets were fairly realistic, but I despised the shaky camera views. It made it seem like they couldn’t shoot the film properly instead of giving it a sense of realism. I will admit that the dynamite crossbow launcher was pretty cool, but nothing else was; particularly the Final Secret Weapon.
The actors were fairly lame as well, Josh Brolin (Jonah Hex) felt like a fairly wooden character with little emotions save for his obsessive desire for revenge and his slurred speech was barely comprehensible at times. John Malkovich (Quentin Turnbull) was a disappointingly one-dimensional character as was Megan Fox (Lilah) who had a rather fake sounding Western drawl, strangely shifted between being a helpless damsel in distress to a butt kickin’ heroine when it suited the thin plot. Even with Fox stripping down as much and as often as she could, she couldn’t save this trainwreck of a film which desperately needed someone to stick to one single plot instead of trying to throw in everything and the kitchen sink as well, creating a mishmash and confusing film.
It’s so bad that I felt it wasn’t even worth the price of renting it, Thank God I didn’t waste money on a movie ticket. All I can is don’t have high expectations and you definitely won’t be disappointed.
RATING: 1 STAR.
